PhD or OPB? Sergio Cisneros chose to influence culture at ground level “I felt like I was participating in an academic draft,” Sergio Cisneros says. Cloistered at Duke University with 19 other scholarship recipients last summer, Cisneros researched and wrote about the challenges surrounding immigration. By summer’s end, with his paper under consideration for publication, PhD programs at Stanford, Duke, Michigan, Vanderbilt and the University of Washington courted him. Yet back home in Oregon, Cisneros’ Hispanic community did not understand his paper. “Friends thought it was cool, but they didn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. “The people who are most affected by some of the legislation don’t know about it. This fosters fear . . . they feel like the government is against them. I’m trying to teach them this isn’t true by informing them.” Cisneros tried a new route, writing opinion editorials about immigration law. His first op-ed in The Oregonian incited more than 250 comments. “They were interacting in a way I was hoping for dialogue from my paper,” he says. “In academic publishing I can interact and influence culture, but not in the same way as journalism. “Knowledge is power, but for knowledge you have to have communication. I want to be a voice for the voiceless – without becoming too much the activist – by giving them knowledge.” Striking PhD programs from his plan, the politics major instead signed up for journalism classes and got a job as a reporter at Univision, a major Spanish-language television network. Days before graduating from George Fox in 2013, he accepted a position at Oregon Public Broadcasting, working in the newsroom and with its radio program Think Out Loud. “The people working at OPB are nationally recognized,” he says. “By working alongside them and learning from the best, hopefully some of that will rub off on me.”
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Cisneros had his pick of PhD programs. Instead, this first-generation Mexican-American chose a path that would help bridge the gap between his cultures.